6/16/2009 @ 7:10AM

Twitter's Activist Initiation

As Twitter‘s popularity has grown, its users living under oppressive foreign regimes have slowly realized the power of the simple microblogging service for organizing political dissent. On Monday, for the first time, Twitter’s administrators seem to have acknowledged that power, too.

Had it not been for a network upgrade that required Twitter to schedule 90 minutes of downtime at 9:45 PDT, Twitter might have continued to play the role of an impartial platform, with no apparent distinction between the plight of Iranian activists and the network capacity needs of oversharing American celebrities.

But when the site’s 90-minute maintenance window was announced Monday afternoon–in the midst of the service’s use in organizing thousands of Iranian dissidents protesting alleged fraud in the national election–the result was a flood of thousands of requests to the site asking that Twitter delay the maintenance downtime.

“Democracy needs you, Twitter!” wrote a user named temp09. “Twitter, do not condemn the people of Iran to silence,” another, named tinyi, added. “Upgrades can wait. The people dying in Iran cannot,” pleaded a Twitterer by the name of hoopiest_frood.

At 4:17 Pacific time, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post on the site that Twitter had worked out a deal with its network provider, NTT America, to delay the maintenance. “Our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran,” Stone wrote.

So, it seems, had Twitter’s staff. The buzzy startup’s employees had likely recognized that supporting the dissidents in this case was also a savvy business decision, argues Rafal Rohozinski, a founder of the Infowar Monitor research group. Unlike other Internet firms like
Google
,
Microsoft
, and
Yahoo!
, which have all been forced to choose in important cases between the interests of their users and those of the authoritarians who limit the rights of those users, Twitter’s role as a protest tool fits snugly with its business motives, he contends.

“They’ve recognized that they’ve inherited this responsibility,” says Rohozinski. “But they’d also be foolish not to recognize that there’s a business case for supporting the Iranian protesters.”

Twitter, whose executives didn’t respond to a request for comment, is playing a number of powerful roles in the unfolding political drama in Iran. As Iran’s government has blocked the use of text messages in response to widespread protests against current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s suspected election fraud, it’s become one of the only ways Iranians can communicate and organize. Iranian Twitterers, including ones going by the handles StopAhmadi and Persiankiwi, sent out a constant stream of updates Monday on protesters’ whereabouts and the actions of the government, documenting police brutality toward protesters and pointing to the next rallying point for supporters of opposing candidate Mir Houssein Moussavi.

Twitter also played a role in circumventing the Iranian government’s attempts to block access to online resources like Facebook, the Moussavi campaign’s Web site and the site of U.S.-supported radio station Radio Farda. By using Twitter to pass on links to proxy servers–computers that relay data from blocked Web sites to circumvent Internet filtering–supporters of the Iranian protesters abroad were able to constantly stay ahead of the government’s suppression tactics.

The use of Twitter for protest has a less passive side, too. On Monday evening, Tehran time, hackers began using “distributed denial of service” attacks to flood Iranian government Web sites with requests for information that took the sites offline. Twitter was used to direct and coordinate those attacks as targets changed. “NOTE to HACKERS– attack www.farhang.gov.ir–pls try to hack all iran gov Web sites. Very difficult for us,” wrote Iranian Twitterer Persiankiwi.

In all, more than a dozen sites came under attack, and targets like Ahmadinejad’s official blog, Ahmadinejad.ir, and the Islamic Republic News Agency’s irna.ir , remain offline.

Iranian dissidents aren’t the first to use Twitter for politically incendiary purposes. Moldovan progressives used a variety of similar tactics to rally against the Communist government following the country’s election last April.

But the fact that Twitter would change its downtime maintenance to accommodate a wide spectrum of protest applications is a sign that Twitter has acknowledged its active role in supporting the protests, says Rob Faris, the research director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “They’ve put themselves on the side of free expression, to let the battleground of ideas have it out,” he says.

But the decision not to take its servers offline in the midst of the Iranian protests also shows Twitter’s interest in showcasing the service’s power as a marketing and communication tool and further raising its profile among Web users, says Infowar Monitor’s Rohozinski. “They’re proving that 140 characters can build an instant mass market,” he says. “I’m sure that raises their value as a company.”

That means that unlike Google, which controversially decided to censor search results in China in 2006, and Yahoo!, which helped the Chinese government gain access to the e-mail of a journalist it later jailed in 2004, Twitter’s business interest lies on the grassroots side of the current political conflict, Rohozinski argues. “The story of Twitter in Iran is the service’s power to pitch a massive, targeted message,” he says. “For Twitter and the protestors, there’s a confluence of interests.”